Boom! The big double-cross revealed!

While a lot more gets explained in the upcoming issue, I was psyched to finally get the story to this point. There has been an uneasy feeling the whole time that this run was more than Dhama Hes let on. I wanted the hints to keep compounding over the last two issues, but this was the scene that was really going to drive home to Roka and company that they’ve been lied to and are into something much deeper than they suspected.

As a general note, this is also where the series starts to go in a direction and tone that I planned since the beginning. I always meant for the entire first arc, “Bad Goods,” to be a very fun and light introduction to the Runners universe, kinda like how the first several issues of Bone lightly eased the readers into a much deeper and more complex world. The problem was that people started viewing Runners as an all-ages book, and that label concerned me.

While I don’t currently plan to do any scenes of really graphic violence, language, or sex, I always knew that the series would be dealing with more questionable themes. These are smugglers after all. They don’t make their money transporting yo-yo’s and candy. So with this arc, I wanted to make that direction in tone very apparent and have it deal with drug running.

So is it “all ages?” I don’t know. I certainly wouldn’t consider it “all ages” in an Owly way. The standard I use is The Lord of the Rings, which is my biggest inspiration and the personal goal I set for myself in what I’d ideally love to achieve. Plenty of kids read that at a younger age, but it does have a lot of complex themes going on. Along those lines, Bone and Star Wars also have some darker themes, but they’re still considered “all ages.”

So I don’t know. I personally have some issues with telling people that Runners is “all ages” but maybe that’s just me. If any of you have an opinion, feel free to post your comments as I’d love to hear them!

On the previous page and this page, the village leader, Goshen, has a walking stick (which he is handing to one of the guards in panel 1 here). This was intended to be an identifying prop for him, but when I got to drawing the first scene in the upcoming issue #4, I needed him to use his hands a lot to gesture and hold items. So the walking stick became a big nuisance. Does he hold onto it while also grabbing something else? Does he keep putting it down and picking it back up again? Ugh. So I ditched it. As it stands, Goshen’s walking stick only appears in the two panels in this scene, and it’s barely noticeable at that. Perhaps I should not have mentioned it at all…

And in retrospect, the fact that I had to draw him handing it to someone else on this page should have been my first clue that it was going to be a nuisance to work with.

And here we have the actual leader of the tribe making his first appearance. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had a hard time coming up with differentiating features for the major Ulon Dosi characters. I wanted them to be visually different, but not in a hokey way. The most logical thing to me was that they’d have different braid patterns and, in some cases, different horn dimensions. So as the village elder, this guy has the largest horns, as well as the longest braids. He’s also the only one with a full beard, since I thought that would give him that older look. He doesn’t have war-beards though, since he’s not a designated warrior, although his two flanking guards do.

The original costume designs for him were much fancier, but they seemed wrong for the character and the tribe’s earthy look. So I toned it way down. As it is now, the only real ornamentation is the yellow color on his tunic and matching yellow bands in his braids.

Aww yeah. The Ulon Dosi village. I have to say I’m really happy with the look of this village.

It went through a lot of iterations and I had a hard time locking down an overriding and recognizable aesthetic. That’s generally important to me since I want different locations and races to have very clear visual cues, not just minor differences. I had settled on the round look of the main huts, with their hide roofs, wooden support arms, and central chimneys, but I didn’t have a larger idea to make the village itself something interesting.

Around the same time, I was reading a travel book on Morocco, since my wife and I were planning a vacation there, and I read something about some Berber villages in the High Atlas Mountains. The description mentioned terraced fields, and that suddenly became the feature I was looking for. I knew this particular Ulon Dosi village was going to be higher up in elevation and I had already established a very rocky look to the terrain, so it made complete sense to make the entire village composed of terraced levels.

I particularly like the idea I came up with to have some of the terraces run into and be contiguous with the rock bases of some huts.

In the upcoming issue #4, it’s pretty important that Bocce (who is back on the Khoruysa Brimia) cannot get through to Roka on their comm system. But the Kaagan-Vas are able to communicate with their boss here. To explain that, I intended to point out that they have much more advanced comm technology with them. On this page, it appears in panel 3 as the gray box just behind the saddle bag that Warsaw is rummaging through. It can also just barely be seen way back in issue #2 on page 14, with Baso adding it to their gear from the lockbox. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t need to shoehorn its mention into the story just to explain a minor detail that most readers wouldn’t care about anyway. But it’s there in case anyone does care.

I wanted a very specific look for these ships to make them menacing and to make the Kaagan-Vas look recognizable for any future appearances. I always planned for the ships to be prominently marked with the KV symbol, since they’re the kind of people who would want their presence known for psychological impact. I originally also planned to do something with red paint markings all over the ships, but I realized that would be too much like the Reavers in Firefly.

I decided instead to go with heavy use of “black metal” and spiny shapes, neither of which, looking at the page now, seem very pronounced here. But I’ll make them more prominent in any future appearances. I’m not sure just yet if the “black metal” is anything special, but as a visual aesthetic, I just thought it would be cool to have their ships covered with haphazard patches of really dark metal tech. In some places, they might be patches to fix where the ship took damage; in other places, they’d be where the KV added weapons onto the ship.

As for the spines, I thought something with a lot of protruding sharp points would be intimidating, visually. They’re not literally sharp points, since it’s not like they actually use them in a stabbing or puncturing capacity. I figure they’re more like extended guns. It seems like a lot of sci-fi ships these days have weapon arrays that are very “internal” and hidden within the body of the ship, mixed in with sensor arrays and the like. I thought it would be cool to have the KV ships look more like old-time pirate ships, with cannons sticking out all over the place. So the idea is that all the spines are external weapon arrays, still controlled from the inside, of course, but much more visually prominent than on most other ships.

You probably can’t really tell, but Meeka is a three-legged dog, with two legs in front and one in back. I just thought that would be a cool design for an alien dog. Well, that and the four ears and blue fur (not that you can tell the color from the washed-out effect).

Flashback!!

Getting the coloring on this sequence took a lot of trial and error. I wanted it to have that washed out, muted sepia, glowy look to it like you’d see in a lot of other flashbacks. I have to say I’m really happy with how it turned out.

In the bottom panel, I had to completely re-draw the buildings. In the original pass, they were much more sci-fi, with more plating and grates and panels. But they just looked wrong. It didn’t make sense to me that these farmers out in the middle of some large expanse would be building huts and stables with large chunks of tech. It seemed like they should be more low tech, with the architecture being of the earth. So I redesigned the buildings to be more reminiscent of adobe huts and clay-tile roofs. It’s not terribly sci-fi in design, but more believable to me. I figure the weird crops and alien animals would give it that sci-fi flair anyway.

Another example of using color as a concepting tool. In this case, the leader of the wolf pack has gray stripes while the others don’t. This sort of thing is a bit subtle for my tastes and not something I would use a lot. I prefer to have the differences more apparent since I’m a big believer in the “silhouette test.” Not sure if I covered that concept elsewhere, but basically it states that with a good design, you should be able to tell one character from another just by silhouette. In this case, I decided the subtlety was acceptable since it really isn’t THAT important that you can tell one wolf-alien from the next. If you pick up on the difference and can single out the leader from the rest of the pack, that’s fine. But it’s not crucial to the storytelling in any way.

It’s “two-fer” day! Two pages for the price of one. And by “price” I mean “free.”

As if I wasn’t complaining about drawing the yak BEFORE. Ugh. This page was a colossal pain and time suck. But I needed it to really drive home the idea that the yak are quite plentiful on Ciceron, contrary to what Roka was told by Dhama Hes. So I figured a double-spread full of yak would do it.

Two things to note on this page: the guns and the alien designs. I’m a big fan of gun designs that don’t just look like regular real-world guns or typical sci-fi futuristic-but-still-kinda-real-world guns. With the Ulon Dosi, I thought it would be cool if their rifles was really just glorified sticks. They obviously aren’t a race steeped in high tech. And they probably wouldn’t have need for really advanced weapons, so their laser rifles are about as basic as you can get. The idea was inspired by the improvised weapons used on Nimbus III in the movie Star Trek V. I guess I’d say, for the horrible abomination and letdown that that movie was, at least I got that one little thing out of it. And who knows, maybe the Brimia crew will sit around a campfire and sing “Row, row, row your boat” some day. I wouldn’t count on it though.

As for the Ulon Dosi aliens, you can see one of them from the back on this page. I thought it would be cool and pretty different to have them with big “capes” of fur on their backs. I don’t feel like I’ve ever seen that kind of thing before, personally, and it makes sense to me. I figure, evolution-wise, at some point long ago, they were four-legged animals like cows (or yak!). At that time, they might have had a big blanket of fur that hung over the entire back and down both sides, with attachment points on all legs. As they evolved, the blanket remained to cover their backs, with attachments remaining just around the neck and undersides of the arms, so that it hung freely.

For the record, it did present some concepting challenges to design clothing that would work with the fur capes, since nothing could really wrap around the back like most clothes. Everything had to go around the neck, across or down the chest and then around the waist underneath the cape. I think it all works though.

The designs for the prominent characters of the Ulon Dosi (AKA goat-alien) tribe were a bit challenging. There are probably three main characters of the bunch, with Clem (the guy in this sequence) being one of them. I figured the males would have different facial hair braids, and additionally, soldiers would have war-beads. As the leader of the armed force, Clem would have the most war-beads. But I needed him to stand out in a more significant way.

I toyed with the idea of an eye-patch, but sometimes that just feels like a cheat, like that’s the go-to way to make someone’s face different from everyone else’s. So I scrapped that. I decided to actually rely more on color than anything else, which is a concept design aesthetic that’s generally not in my vocabulary since I’m so used to working in B&W. But since I am working in color now, I figure I might as well use it to full advantage, so I made Clem’s tunic red, while everyone else wears hides in more natural tones. In going with color, I made sure to include some of that red in his face as well (in the braid bands), since I wanted him to still be recognizable in close-ups where his tunic wasn’t in frame.

To cover my bases, I also gave Clem some notable differences in costume. Unlike everyone else, he has an additional layer of hide patches, which I figure might also serve as light leather armor. And I just thought the patchwork look was pretty cool.

Could it be that Bocce has had a bad run-in with the Kaagan-Vas? Maybe. Well, actually, yeah, that seems pretty obvious from Roka and Ril’s conversation. On the plus side, you WILL see the incident they’re referring to later in this very story arc. It has something to do with him losing a game of backgammon to them. Man, is that one intense high-stakes game of backgammon.

FYI, it’s not really backgammon. Although that would be funny. No, the real story is a tiny bit less funny, and by “tiny bit,” I mean “not funny at all.”